12/30/08

Our All-Panelist Chat is set for 7:30pm, EST. We have 161 science fiction/fantasy books from which we must pick ten finalists (5 younger, 5 older). Some of us are still frantically reading, or re-reading--there's one I read in June, for instance, that I want to look at again. And some of us (me) are, in a slightly over-the-top way, checking local bookstores in the (perhaps mercifully vane) hope that unavailable, and hence unread, books have materialized, taking the afternoon off work to read, obsessively checking email to see what the other panelists might be thinking (although they seem to be too busy reading, or possibly working, to be sharing their thoughts). Some of us (again, me) are also worried that our aged computers will not work properly during Group Chat...

And then there's the issue of actually making Final Decisions. So tricky. For other awards (naming no names), people aren't necessarily expecting to Like the book that wins. But we are supposed to be picking books that will be passed from hand to hand in a viral way. And what if nobody likes them?????